The Peanut Gallery

We went up to Champaign today with family. Mild weather, nice day for an outing. :D

World Harvest keeps improving their stock of tea and spices. \o/ Regrettably the cumin and ginger bottles don't fit in our spice rack. >_< But I found some other stuff I haven't seen in a while so I'm happy. Also the food selection on the Strawberry Fields side is improving. The beef pie is a tasty little thing.

My partner Doug and I tried the gansito split at El Oasis. Gansito is a Mexican junk food similar to a chocolate-covered twinkie. I imagine it would be awful by itself, but is quite good with ice cream, either mixed in or like this, split with several scoops of ice cream in between. Chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla topped with whipped cream, nuts, and a cherry. <3

Barnes & Noble continues to grow more annoying. Twice I had someone stop and ask if I needed help finding anything. Well no, you already broke the bookstore, so you can't fix that. I need to browse by looking at a batch of similar things arranged by topic. Now that you have dispersed the new books among the old books, this is impossible, unless you want to go hand-sort the new ones for me. The cookbooks are splodged together, some by topic, others by author or title. So instead of having all the special diet books together, organized by name of their theme, which would be easy to browse, they're all scattered over a couple of bookcases. Someone actually asked me if I knew the titles I wanted. Well if I knew the titles, I'd be able to find them myself! It was yet another damning example of how the store is catering not to bookworms, but to people who don't usually go into bookstores. I guess they've been hyping electronics often enough that they're getting a lot of traffic that can't even find a help desk. 0_o It's gotten to where just being asked is an irritant, another reminder that I'm no longer their target audience. Jesus, lady, I was helping shelve library books when I was four. >_< I did find a couple of books to buy, but it's not fun like it used to be. Bah.

At Wal-Mart I found a new pair of shorts. Things that make me ridiculously happy: garments made of that silky, ventilated fabric that's almost never used on girl clothes, only guy clothes. These shorts are lined and have contrasting trim around the edges. I first got gray with pink trim to go with some tie-dye shirts I bought. Then I got the turquoise with white and tonight the black with white. I wanted the cobalt blue, but so far everyone's been out of that in my size. I'd be happier if these had pockets, but I like the fabric enough to tolerate the lack. They're really comfortable and really, really genderfucking awesome. :D

Everyone's all in a lather about the mess in Charlottesville. I generally prefer to sidle around the attack and then counterattack directly at the opponent's fundamental goals. In this case, they want to promote racism and violence. So I can undermine their efforts by promoting:

If you want to poke a bigot in the eye, you can go shopping for things made by black writers or crafters, or you can buy multicultural-themed material from any author. I've got a fluffy family dinner with multiple ethnicities in "Dinner at Donnie's" ($171) in Danso and Family.

'Eye of the Beholder' from Batman Annual #14 is probably the most important modern Two-Face story ever written. This was the issue that fleshed out Harvey Dent's origins and redefined his characterization as someone who was already struggling with his psyche before the acid hit. A lot of the material here was later used in 'The Long Halloween', the animated series as well as The Dark Knight.

Unfortunately this has yet to be reprinted by DC, either in trade or in digital format. I imagine the latter will happen sooner or later (Comixology is constantly adding old comics to the archive) but DC's treatment of this has always puzzled me.

'One of the complaints the Byrne Bashers like to dust off from time to time is that I have a "fetish" about young girls crushing on older men. In a forty five year career, this is something I have done a grand total of four times with Mac and Heather Hudson, Lana and Superman in GENERATIONS, Rita Farr and Cliff Steele, and Reed and Sue Richards. And that last one was set in place by Stan and Jack. As fetishes go, not much to write home about.' - John Byrne

There’s a thing readers should understand with this book: we’re not doing business in the normal way. There will be no tie-ins until we get back to Earth. We’re self-contained, telling our own story, beholden to nobody, and we’re on a trip out to the far reaches of Marvel Space, and we’re going to come back changed, and carrying something very special with us. -- Al Ewing